Carnaby Street is short. Roughly two hundred and fifty metres of Soho running north from Beak Street up to Great Marlborough Street, named after Karnaby House, a building of 1683 that stood just east of its southern end. For about eight years in the middle of the twentieth century it was the most photographed shopping street on earth, and it has spent every decade since working out what on earth to do about that.
People ask us whether it is worth the walk. It is, though probably not for the reason most visitors go, and the gap between what the street was and what it sells now is a fair part of the answer.
A Glaswegian with a Steam Iron
John Stephen was born in Glasgow in 1934 and came down to London in the 1950s to work at Vince Man's Shop in Newburgh Street, which sold tight trousers to a clientele of bodybuilders and theatricals. He learned the trade there, saved hard, and in 1956 opened his own place, His Clothes, on Beak Street. A fire the following year pushed him round the corner to 5 Carnaby Street, which at that point was a back lane of tobacconists and a couple of tailors with rents low enough to explain why he ended up there at all.
What Stephen understood was turnover. He changed the windows constantly, played records loudly through the open door, priced low enough that a lad on an apprentice wage could buy something new most weeks, and put shirts in colours no established outfitter would have hung on a rail. By the middle of the 1960s he had well over a dozen shops on and around the street, and the papers had started calling him the King of Carnaby Street.
Lord John, Mates and the Land Grab
The rest arrived fast. Lord John opened in 1963, run by the three Gold brothers, David, Harold and Warren, and painted a mural across its corner building that became one of the most photographed walls in London. Irvine Sellar opened Mates in 1965 and did something nobody else on the street had tried, selling men's and women's clothes on the same floor with no partition between them. Sellar later left retail altogether and developed the Shard, which tells you roughly what sort of operator the street was pulling in by then.
The clothes were quick and often badly made, and that was half the appeal. A Lambretta shirt bought on a Saturday afternoon and worn to a club that night did not need to survive five years. It needed to be new. The whole street ran on novelty and everybody involved knew it.
April 1966 and the Time Cover
Time magazine published its London: The Swinging City issue dated 15 April 1966, written by Piri Halasz, with a psychedelic collage of the capital across the front. Carnaby Street was named inside. Within months the pavement was packed with Americans hunting for something that had already begun moving elsewhere, because the people who had made the street worth writing about were by then drinking in Chelsea.
That is the pattern with every scene anybody has ever loved. The coverage turns up just after the moment does. By 1967 the street had shifted from selling clothes to selling the idea of itself, and the stock showed it. The same could be said of every revival since, including the one we sell into.
The Street in Nine Dates
A rough chronology, because the mythology tends to compress the whole thing into one very long 1966.
| Year | What happened on the street |
|---|---|
| 1683 | Karnaby House is built just east of the street and gives it its name |
| 1956 | John Stephen opens His Clothes on Beak Street |
| 1957 | A fire moves him round the corner to 5 Carnaby Street |
| 1963 | Lord John opens, run by the three Gold brothers |
| 1965 | Irvine Sellar opens Mates, selling to both sexes on one floor |
| 1966 | Time runs the Swinging City issue in April and the tourists follow |
| 1973 | Carnaby Street is pedestrianised |
| 1979 | The 2 Tone and mod revivals bring some clothing trade back |
| Now | The block is run as a single managed estate with Kingly Court behind it |
Pedestrianisation and the Slump
Carnaby Street was pedestrianised in 1973, which ought to have helped and largely did not. The trade had already turned by then. Union Jack ashtrays, printed T shirts, plastic policeman helmets and racks of postcards nobody ever posted. Shops that had sold clothes to men who cared about clothes were replaced by shops selling proof of attendance to people who wanted to show somebody at home where they had been.
It stayed like that for the best part of fifteen years. The mod revival at the end of the 1970s brought a certain amount of clothing trade back, and Britpop gave the street another surge in the middle of the 1990s. But it stopped being the place where a style got invented and became the place where one gets bought, and those are two entirely different jobs.
What Outlasted the Souvenir Years
A few of the original menswear names carried on through all of it, Merc London among them, and most did not. What is striking looking back is how thin that survival was. The mythology of the place is enormous and the trade that produced it lasted less than a decade, which is why a legend attached to one short street has needed constant retelling to stay upright at all.
We carry the mod brands that came out of that period from our unit in Driffield, including the shirts and Harrington jackets that were the street's actual output, not its gift shop version. It all goes out by post, which is a good deal less romantic than a Saturday afternoon in Soho and a good deal more likely to fit.
What the Street Sells Now, and Why It Still Counts
Chain stores, trainer shops, a great deal of food, and a small handful of survivors that have earned their place. Kingly Court behind it is mostly restaurants across three floors now. Turn up expecting 1966 and you will be disappointed inside four minutes, though in fairness you would have been disappointed in 1967 as well, and plenty of people were.
Go anyway. The proportions of the street are still right, and the Shakespeare's Head still holds the corner of Great Marlborough Street and Fouberts Place, though the building standing there now is a 1920s rebuild. Then come home and buy the clothes somewhere they still fit properly. Our full catalogue and our mod suits manage perfectly well without a W1 postcode to prop them up.
Carnaby Street FAQ
Dates, shops and whether the walk is worth doing, settled quickly.
- Why is Carnaby Street associated with mod? Because John Stephen opened his first shop on Beak Street in 1956, moved onto Carnaby Street the year after, and went on to run more than a dozen menswear shops on and around the street through the 1960s, selling cheap, fast changing clothes to young men. The mod scene bought there in volume. The press then made the connection permanent.
- When was Carnaby Street pedestrianised? In 1973. The retail mix had already shifted from clothing towards souvenirs by that point, so the change did far less for the street's fortunes than anybody hoped it would.
- Is Carnaby Street still worth visiting? Yes, if you go for the buildings and the history rather than the shopping, because the street layout is much as it was and a few original names are still trading. Do not expect to find anything there you could not order online. Half an hour will do it.
- What was the Time magazine Swinging London cover? Time dated 15 April 1966 ran an issue titled London: The Swinging City, written by Piri Halasz, with a collage of the capital on the front. It named Carnaby Street directly and turned the street into an international destination within a matter of weeks.
- Which shops made Carnaby Street famous? John Stephen's His Clothes and the dozen or so other fronts he ran on and around the street, Lord John from 1963 with its painted corner building, and Mates from 1965, which put menswear and womenswear on one floor with no partition. Between them they set the pace that everything else on the street copied.